hitchhike home. Another time he got into a fight with his mother and was
going to leave - forever. He came over to Dixie's house to say good-bye.
J A N UARY-J U LY 1 95 4 '" 75
They cried in each other's arms; then she watched him drive off. and
promptly drive back again. as she stood on her front porch. They couldn't
be separated - ever. They talked about marriage. but they were going to
wait. When they got married they wanted their families to share in it.
TH EY W E N T T O C H U RC H together. though not as often as Dixie
would have liked. Elvis was good about attending his Bible class. but
he didn't always go to the service and sometimes he would just pick her
up afterward. Sometimes when they did attend. they would arrive with a
group of young people just before the service and sit in the back. making
sure that parents and elders knew they were present. Then when the service
was well under way and all eyes, were on Reverend Hamill. they
would sneak out the door and drive down to the colored church at East
Trigg. less than a mile away. where the Reverend Brewster delivered his
stirring sermons and Queen C. Anderson and the Brewsteraires were the
featured soloists. They reveleo in the exotic atmosphere. the music was
out of this world - but they could only stay a few minutes. they had to
get back to First; Assembly before they were missed. Sometimes at night
they would come back for the WHBQ broadcast of Camp Meeting of the
Air. Often James Blackwood would be present. and Pastor Hamill's son.
Jimmy. and the other Songfellows frequently attended; there was in fact a
whole contingent of whites who came to be uplifted by the music and by
Dr. Brewster's eloquence and probity of character. Dr. Brewster constantly
preached on the theme that a better day was coming. one in which
all men could walk as brothers. while across Memphis Sam Phillips listened
on his radio every Sunday without fail. and future Sun producer
Jack Clement often attended with his father. a Baptist deacon and choir
director. "because it was a happening place. it was heartfelt. that's what
was happening in Memphis. "
They went t o the movies - double features - a t least twice a week.
A couple of times Elvis took Dixie to Humes. Once he sang a song on the
talent show in which he told her he had performed the previous year. He
paraded proudly in front of his old schoolmates. put his arm around her.
talked with some of the guys that he knew from the Courts. while all the
while turning her hand over in his - he didn't so much want to introduce
her into his world as show her off to it. It was a little bit the same when
they visited Tupelo. Once they went with Mr. and Mrs. Presley and
76 <-.... " WIT H O UT Y O U "
visited relatives; another time they went down with Elvis' aunt Clettes
and uncle Vester, and once again Elvis showed every respect to his uncles
and aunts and cousins down there, but it was definitely a "look at me"
kind of thing. He was proud of himself, proud of his clothes, proud of his
girl, proud of what he had learned in the city - and why not? In Dixie's
view he had every reason to feel that way about himself.
Mostly, though, they stayed close to home, didn't do anything that exotic
- it was almost like playing house. Sometimes they would baby-sit
for Dixie's cousins and just sit there and watch TV. Sometimes Mr. and
Mrs. Presley would go out, leaving them the house to themselves. Much
of the time they stayed in the same North Memphis neighborhood where
the Presleys had lived for the past five and a half years. The Suzore NO. 2
was just around the comer and was cheaper than any of the movie palaces
uptown - even if you did run the risk of finding rats underfoot when the
lights came up. Charlie's Record Shop moved across the street that spring;
the bus stopped right in front of it, and sometimes Dixie met Elvis there.
Evidently the proprietor and his wife, Helen, had known Elvis for some
time, because after a few visits he introduced her to them, and after that
they always greeted her in a friendly way, even if Elvis hadn't arrived yet.
There was a jukebox playing all the hme and a little soda fountain where
you could get a Coke or a NuGrape soda - and then there were the hundreds
of 78s, not just the latest hits but r&b hits from years before, too.
There were two or three listening booths, and if it wasn't crowded you
could hang around for hours sometimes just listening to the music. That
was where Elvis first played her the original of one of the songs he sang all
the time, Lonnie Johnson's "Tomorrow Night." It was good, but it wasn't
as good as Elvis'. That was where she first heard the original versions of a
lot of the songs that he sang, and sometimes ifhe wanted to try a new one
he would ask her for the words, because she always had a good memory
for music.
He seemed to know quite a few of the kids who hung out there, but
he never introduced her. He told her about a record he had made a few
months before at some little record company out on Union, but he never
played it for her, and he never told her that Charlie had put it on the jukebox
for a while right in the store, with his name written out in script on
the jukebox selection list. Once in a very rare while one or the other of
them would actually buy a record - they both had record players at
home, and Elvis had a small, treasured collection. Sometimes he would
J A N U A RY -J U L Y 1 9 5 4 no.. 77
bring some of his favorite records over to her house, and they would just
sit there and listen.
More and more she realized how much he loved music. As spring
turned to summer, he would sing to her for hours sometimes, free of the
self-consciousness that had plagued him initially, particularly around her
family. She didn't know whether he was singing to her or just singing for
the sake of singing, but his face took on a luminous quality, there was a
special expression that he had when he was momentarily at rest. At the
Presleys' he was always fooling around on the piano, picking out a tune
that they might have heard on the radio - he could play anything after
hearing it once or twice, nothing fancy, simply sticking to the melody.
Sometimes he would sit at the piano and just sing hymns. Occasionally
Gladys might join in, though never Vernon, and Dixie was very selfconscious
about her own voice, but they would all gather around the
piano in a tight little group, participating if only by their presence and by
their approval. "We shared everything, we talked about everything - he
would talk to me about things that I'm confident he never would have
revealed to anyone else. But nothing was ever said about what he wanted
to do. Maybe he had deep ambitions that we didn't talk about, because in
his mind it was so completely alien, but he wasn't trying to be a musician
at night or anything like that. I just thought he was a guy who played the
guitar and loved music."
He did talk to her about his ambition to join the Songfellows, but that
was just a little amateur quartet out of church. At some point that spring
he confessed to her that he had auditioned for the group and been turned
down - he was deeply disappointed, and even though he told Dixie that
the reason they hadn't taken him was that the guy they thought was
going to leave had decided to stay, it seemed obvious that he didn't believe
it. "They told me I couldn't sing," he told his father. Jimmy Hamill,
the minister's son, said, "Elvis, why don't you give it up?" He was hurt,
Dixie said, "but it was like, 'Well, that didn't work out, let's go on to the
rest ofit.' "
Without fail they attended the monthly All-Night Singings at Ellis that
the Blackwood Brothers sponsored. They had each gone on their own
before they ever met and happily discovered that this was yet another
thing they had in common. They loved the Speer Family and the LeFevres
out of Atlanta, Wally Fowler never failed to shake the audience up
with "Gospel Boogie," and they thrilled to the Sunshine Boys, featuring
7 8 " W I T H O U T Y O U "
the zoom bass of J. D. Sumner, formerly of the Stamps' Sunny South
Quartet. The Statesmen and the Blackwoods both had RCA Victor contracts,
and in the spring of 1954 the Blackwood Brothers went up to New
York and won the Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts contest, which it seemed
everyone in Memphis must have watched. Elvis and Dixie never went
backstage at Ellis - they would never have dared, and they had no reason
to - but during the intermissions they joined the other fans who clustered
around the tables that each group set up to sell their records and
songbooks and hung on their every word. They knew James Blackwood,
of course; they saw him at church all the time and had great respect for
the dignified appearance and professionalism of the group, with their dark
suits, precise diction, and carefully worked out harmonies. But it was the
Statesmen who remained their favorites - listen to Jake, Elvis would say
to Dixie as he hit yet another thrilling high note with that controlled vibrato
and the crowd went wild and called for him to do it again. As for Big
Chief, he went about as far as you could go, it seemed: the crowd just
loved him, they were with him from the moment he first walked out onstage,
and when he started in to shaking his leg and dancing around, they
just about tore the rafters off. Pastor Hamill wouldn't approve, he didn't
think much of quartet singing in any form, despite his son's participation
and the celebrity the Blackwood Brothers lent his church. Good Christian
people didn't seek out that sort of adulation, good Christian people didn't
need to shake their leg and dance the hootchy-koo up onstage, good
Christian people were saved by faith, not stardom - but Elvis and Dixie
didn't care. "We were just so impressed with them, we practically worshiped
Jake Hess, we were like groupies, I guess, the quartets were like
part of our family. "
They would even go down to WMPS sometimes just to catch the
noontime broadcasts that Bob Neal hosted. Dixie had never been to a
radio station before, but Elvis was right at home, finding them a seat in
the front row, nodding curtly at James Blackwood while looking away
from him as if it was accidental - there was never any more contact than
that. Elvis couldn't be still, he was fidgeting constantly, drumming his fingers
on the side of the chair, his leg going all the time. It drove Dixie's
mother crazy, she'd ask her if there was something the matter with him,
even bring it to Elvis' attention, and Dixie would defend him without fail,
but it embarrassed her, too. She wondered if there was something the
matter; she supposed he would grow out of it, she just wished he
J A N U A RY-J U L Y 1 9 5 4 7 9
wouldn't d o i t in public. They enjoyed the broadcasts. Sometimes while
Bob was doing the commercials James or one of the other Blackwoods
would sneak up behind him and comb his hair down over his eyes and the
audience would bust out laughing.
Starting in April they began to go out to Riverside Park every week,
two or three times a week, whenever it was warm enough. Sometimes on
the weekends they would eat fried chicken on the bluff; McKellar Lake
was full of boaters and water-skiers and young couples just having a good
time. More often than not, they would double-date with Elvis' cousin
Gene, who was going out off and on with Dixie's sister Juanita. Elvis and
Gene were goofy together - they acted as if they had some kind of joke
going on between them all the time, speaking in a kind of private language
that no one else could understand, laughing at things that weren't
funny to anyone else. It made Dixie momentarily uncomfortable, as if
somehow she were being excluded, as if- despite all the intimacies that
they had shared and the ease with which she could have embarrassed him
(she thought that Elvis must be the most easily embarrassed boy she had
ever met) - as if she were somehow the outsider. But then she remembered
the innate sweetness of his nature, the dreams and confidences they
shared: "He was not a phony, he was not a put-on, he was not a show-off,
and once you were around him long enough to see him be himself, not
just act the clown, anyone could see his real self, you could see his sweetness,
you could see the humility, you could see the desire to please. " It
was just that he and Gene acted funny together sometimes.
So many nights they ended up at the park, with or without Gene, in a
group or by themselves, but whether they came alone or with others it
seemed like they always connected with their crowd. They hung out at
the pavilion area overlooking the lake, where you could get a Coke or listen
to the jukebox and dance at Rocky's Lakeside refreshment stand, a
screened-in area especially for teens. Usually there would be at least ten
or twelve couples in the parking lot, and, without too much coaxing, Elvis
could always be induced to get his guitar out of the backseat and, leaning
up against the car, start to play. "He wasn't shy, he just had to be asked I
think he just didn't want to impose. No one else ever did it, no one else
had the nerve. He sang songs that were popular and a lot of the old bluestype
songs; he did some of the old spirituals, too. You know, it was funny.
Right from the start it was as if he had a power over people, it was like
they were transformed. It wasn't that he demanded anybody's attention,
8 0 '" " W I T H O U T Y O U "
but they certainly reacted that way - it didn't matter how rough they
were or whether they even acted like they were going to be interested or
not, they were, once he started singing. Like when Pastor Hamill walked
up in the pulpit he commanded everyone's attention, it was the same
thing with Elvis, it was always that way." Sometimes he would command
their attention with a beautiful love song, then change the lyrics to parody
the song, but he always kept their attention. "People were just mesmerized,
and he loved being the center of attention. I think he could have
sung to everybody in the entire city of Memphis and not cared at all."
Sometimes they would just park in the lot overlooking the lake and
listen to the radio, looking down at the water. They listened to Dewey
Phillips playing the rhythm and blues hits on Red Hot and Blue, never
country music. They got a big kick out of Dewey's Dizzy Dean impressions,
his constant pitch to his audience to go out and buy a "fur-lined
mousetrap," and his ads for locally brewed Falstaff beer ("If you can't
drink it, freeze it and eat it. If you can't do that, open up a cotton-picking
rib and POUR it in"). "Call Sam!" Dewey repeated at frequent intervals,
almost as punctuation for his show - but, for his part, Elvis never spoke
to Dixie about Sam; she had practically forgotten about the record that he
said he had made, and as far as she was concerned they could just keep
coming out to Riverside Park forever, Elvis would go on singing to her
and their friends, they would get married someday, and life would go on,
just as it was meant to be. Every so often a police car would pass by,
sweeping the parking lot with the big beam of its spotlight, making sure
no boy was taking unwanted advantage, no girl was going to get in trouble.
But there was nothing like that to worry about here. You had two
level-headed teenagers listening to Dewey Phillips on the radio who knew
when it was time to go home.
Toward the end of April, Elvis got a new job. He hadn't been happy
with the old one since they made him get a haircut, and the new one on
Poplar was just around the comer from the Courts. It involved working
for an electrical contractor, Crown Electric, and he was going to be driving
a truck, bringing supplies out to the industrial building sites. If he
wanted he would have a chance to train as an electrician; it was a long
apprenticeship and required going to night school, but the opportunity
was there. The owners, Mr. and Mrs. Tipler, seemed very nice - they
were warm and considerate and seemed to accept their new employee for
who he was.
J A N U A RY-J U LY 1 9 5 4 '" 8 1
In fact, Gladys Tipler had been warned by the lady at the employment
office that she might find the new applicant's appearance a bit off-putting.
But, the woman said, he was a good boy, despite his appearance, and the
Tiplers were won over by his polite manner and by his clear devotion to
his mother. He just wanted to help her, he told them at his job interview
on a Monday, and they hired him on the spot, never regretting the decision,
although Mrs. Tipler was bemused that he spent so much time on
his hair when he arrived in the morning and every time he came back in
from a run. She finally sent him to her hairdresser, Blake Johnson, of
Blake's Coiffures at Poplar and Lauderdale, but he would go only after
closing time because he was embarrassed. Once in a while at work he
might see Paul Burlison, who was well on his way to becoming a master
electrician and whom he knew from playing around the Courts and from
playing with Dorsey Burnette, yet another employee of Crown. Paul and
Dorsey told him about some of the places they played out near the naval
base in Millington, and Dorsey told him about one night he had played at
Shadow Lawn in Oakland with Johnny Black's brother Bill, and a guitarist
named Scotty Moore, from Gadsden, Tennessee, who had only recently
gotten out of the navy himself and was now living in Memphis. There had
been a big brawl that night, and Dorsey had gotten stabbed in the tailbone.
He and his father and his brother, Johnny, had gone out looking for
the guys who had done it, but they never found them. Dorsey and Paul
invited Elvis to come out and play with them some night if he felt like it,
but he told them he didn't think so, he was kind of tied up with other
things right now, he might be playing out at the Home for Incurables
again, and he had a little thing coming up at the Girls' Club over on Alabama
- his voice trailed off in a mumble.
His paycheck came to forty dollars a week, and every Friday he came
home and presented it to his father. It was, Dixie noted with some amazement,
almost as if it were Elvis' responsibility to take care of his dad. "He
just took out enough to last us for the week, fifty cents for gas, a dollarfifty
to get us into the Suzore three times maybe, a little bit extra for food,
the rest was for his mom and dad." There was no reluctance about it
whatsoever, it was just the way things were; his parents were getting
older, he told Dixie, and he wanted to take care of them. And they were
just so proud of him, too - Mrs. Presley bragged on him every chance
she got, and it seemed like he was equally proud of the strides he had
made, for himself and his family. One time he came to pick Dixie up at
82 '" " WI T H O UT Y O U "
her house after work, and they must have been doing a dirty job, because
he was a mess, wearing greasy overalls with a hole in them. Dixie's mother
wanted to take a picture of them both, but he hid behind a clothesline so
you couldn't see the clothes he had on.
One Saturday in mid May Elvis floored Dixie. He had run into a mutual
friend, Ronnie Smith, at the Cotton Carnival. Dixie knew Ronald
from the neighborhood and from South Side High, but Elvis had met him
at a birthday party and discovered a mutual passion for music, as well as
for cars and girls. With Ronnie he had played a couple of little gigs (the
highlight was a Lodge banquet at the Columbia Mutual Towers on Main),
but at sixteen Ronald was also a member of a full-fledged professional
band led by Eddie Bond, and, he said, Eddie was looking for a singer. Why
didn't Elvis stop by? He had a tryout that night, Elvis told Dixie excitedly,
at a club called the Hi-Hat on South Third, not far from her house. He
wondered if she would go with him - he needed her to go with him, they
would just stay a little while, then they could go to a movie or McKellar
Lake or something.
Dixie didn't know what to say; of course she would go, but it was so
completely out of the blue. If he had asked her to come see him sing with a
professional quartet, now that would have been a shock, but at least it
would have been in line with something she might have anticipated, something
in keeping with what she and he both saw as a kind of spiritual gift.
And what if someone saw them, what if one of her parents' friends saw her
going into the club or there was a Railway Express co-worker of her
father's sitting inside? It didn't stop her, of course. Nor did she ever question
Elvis' judgment. "He was just so nervous, I was nervous, too. When
we got there, there weren't a lot of people, but there was a dance floor and
there were drinks being served, because the man said something to us
when we came in about our being too young to even be in there. I had a
Coke. We sat at a table and drank Cokes."
The featured performer, Eddie Bond, was a seasoned veteran of
twenty-one who had been playing around town since he was fifteen and
had just gotten out of the navy. A confident entertainer and self-styled
entrepreneur who twenty years later would run for sheriff of Memphis (in
1969 he composed "The Ballad of Buford Pusser," around which the popular
movie Walking Tall was constructed), Bond came over to the table to say
hello. He asked Elvis what he did for a living, and Elvis said he drove a truck
for Crown Electric, but Dixie was embarrassed for him because he
J A N U A RY-J U L Y 1 95 4 83
couldn't stop drumming his fingers on the table. He had gotten a haircut
especially for this performance, and he was wearing his bullfighter's outfit
with a pink shirt. In no time it was his tum to go onstage. He did two
songs by himself, just strumming his guitar and singing; Dixie thought
he was wonderful, but before she knew it, it was over. "It was almost
like ohh-Iet's-hurry-and-get-out-of-here, glad-it-was-over type of thing."
Before leaving he conferred briefly with Eddie Bond, but Dixie was at a
distance and he never told her what was said. In later years Bond would
boast jocularly that he was "the only person who ever fired [Elvis Presley]
from the bandstand" and explain that it was the club owners who forced
him to tum down the fledgling performer. Ronnie Smith was under the
impression that Eddie wanted to book him into another, rougher joint
across the street so that Eddie could have two bands working at the same
time. Elvis for his part took it as a bitter rejection. Bond told him, he confided
to his friend George Klein in 1957, that he had better stick with driving
a truck " 'because you're never going to make it as a singer.' We were
on a train going to Hollywood to make Jailhouse Rock, and Elvis said, 'I
wonder what Eddie Bond thinks now. Man, that sonofabitch broke my
heart.' "
The days went by. More and more, Dixie said, there was talk of marriage.
"We came very close one day to getting in the car and driving to
Hernando, Mississippi - anyone could get married in Hernando. We
talked about it several times very seriously, about what we would do after
we got married and where we would live. We were seriously talking
about it, but I don't know how, one of us always had the good sense to
say, 'But what if-?' I was still in school, and it would have just broken
my mom and dad's heart." Dixie was going to start her summer job at
Goldsmith's in the cosmetics department soon, but before she did, she
and her family were going away on vacation, to visit relatives in Florida
for the first two weeks of July. She was worried about that - it would be
their first separation, and Elvis got so jealous, he hated for her just to be
with other people, let alone other boys. Dixie enjoyed being with people,
"but he couldn't stand it if I was doing something that didn't involve him,
he was kind of possessive in that respect." Sometimes Dixie thought the
whole family was just too wrapped up in themselves, or maybe it was just
in their dreams for Elvis; it was so hard to get inside that tight little circle.
But then again, she knew that was just the way country people were
sometimes.
8 4 '" "W I T H O UT Y O U "
They picnicked in Overton Park, they went fishing together one time,
though Elvis wasn't much of a "nature boy"; he drove her around in the
Crown Electric truck and got reprimanded by Mr. Tipler for getting off
his route and running late. He always had his guitar in the truck with him,
and he would play for his fellow workers at the drop of a hat. Mrs. Tipler
told him to "put down that damn guitar, it's going to be the ruination of
you," but she said it with an indulgent smile. He was no longer so sure
himself that he had the makings of a good electrician, because, as he said
in a 1956 interview, he didn't know if he had the requisite attention span.
"I was in doubt as to whether I would ever make it, because you had to
keep your mind right on what you're doing, you can't be the least bit absentminded
or you're liable to blow somebody's house up. I didn't think I
was the type for it, but I was going to give it a try."
He was also going to continue to give recording a try. Marion Keisker
saw his truck pass by the studio often, and once in a while he would stop
in at 706 Union in his work clothes and cast about for a conversational
subject, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. He was always asking
her if she knew of a band, trying to assume an ease and a familiarity
which he obviously did not feel, and her heart went out to him. Dixie,
too, sensed that the tryout with Eddie Bond was not simply an isolated
incident, though in this one area, evidently, he did not confide his innermost
feelings to her. She had no doubt that ifhe wanted to make a record
he would make a record, but she had no idea what making a record really
meant - unless it meant getting on the radio. She knew he could never
stand to make his living from playing dives and honky-tonks like the Hi
Hat, she just wasn't sure what the alternatives were, or how you got to be
on Bob Neal's High Noon Round-Up with the Blackwood Brothers and
Eddie Hill.
On Saturday, June 26, just a week before Dixie was scheduled to leave
for Florida, Elvis finally got his chance. Miss Keisker called around noon.
"She said, 'Can you be here by three?' " he said in later years, whenever
he recounted the story. "I was there by the time she hung up the phone. "
What had happened was that, on his last trip to Nashville, in May, to
record the Prisonaires, Sam had picked up an acetate from Red Wortham,
the song publisher who had originally steered the Prisonaires to Sun. Phillips
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